Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition
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Citrix just released Xenserver 7.3 and I saw some buzz about it so I went to check it out on xenserver.org. Their blog post on the subject:
https://xenserver.org/blog/entry/xenserver-7-3-changes-to-the-free-edition.html
They are absolutely gutting the feature set on the free edition. Gutting it. Let's look at the features they are removing:
The full list of features being moved is:
- Dynamic Memory Control
- Xen Storage Motion
- Active Directory Integration
- Role Based Access Control
- GPU Pass-Through
- Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery)
- XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard
- Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts (existing larger pools will continue to work, but no new host joins will be permitted)
So basically all the features. All the features that small deployments and those who have home labs might use or want to play with.
No dynamic memory which severely limits your density and ability to overprovision. No storage motion, so no live migration on storage. You need to move from one storage to another, fuck you it is going to take you hours and your VM will be down the entire time. No GPU pass through, no DR built-in (that one sort of makes sense, I was surprised when it was included in the free edition), no rolling upgrades and a maximum of 3 hosts per pool.
Typical Citrix bullshit. They do this on this product on a cycle. They want to expand their userbase so they open up the feature set on the free edition. Then idiots in suits think they can recapture that market and see those as all lost sales so they gut it. Then people move to other platforms or just never pick it up as a skill because it doesn't make sense for their home labs. Then they want to expand their dwindling userbase...lather, rinse, repeat.
And to top it off, there is no place to even currently download the free edition (Citrix's website is usually just as broken as MS's) and no place to download the 7.2 iso at all. Attempting to download from the Citrix website gives me this:
Bang up job, you incompetent bastards. I still haven't forgiven you for purchasing Kaviza, killing the NFP pricing, jacking up the prices and then killing the product. I am pretty sure they bought that one just to kill it, but it is also possible that they killed it with their incompetence.
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We are using proxmox. How does it compare?
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@cartman82 I have looked in to it in the past. Time to give it another look. I am going to check out oVirt also. Would be interested in other suggestions.
The first person to suggest Hyper-V gets moved to the top of the list of people whose homes I am going to burn down.
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@polygeekery
I hear Hyper-V is great for turning your servers into a heat source that can be used to facilitate facility burning.
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@izzion said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
facilitate facility burning.
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Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition
Let's make that headline more...today:
Citrix Repeals Xenserver Neutrality
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
no place to download the 7.2 iso at all.
Of course not, why would you want that? Get 7.3! It's the latest! The greatest!
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@pleegwat I should have mentioned that you can't download any version currently.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@pleegwat I should have mentioned that you can't download any version currently.
Duh, not without net neutrality.
Filed Under: When will this get old?
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@boomzilla said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
When will this get old?
Not sure when, but that point has already been passed.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@pleegwat I should have mentioned that you can't download any version currently.
You did, but facts
jokes.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
The first person to suggest Hyper-V gets moved to the top of the list of people whose homes I am going to burn down.
Why? Have you tried it? I actually quite like it
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@chrish said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
The first person to suggest Hyper-V gets moved to the top of the list of people whose homes I am going to burn down.
Why? Have you tried it? I actually quite like it
DIAF. It is garbage. Garbage with a lot of overhead.
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@polygeekery Just became a XenServer fan about 60 days ago after installing 7.2. Moved all my stuff, got a bunch of others to try it out, and then ... today ... WTF?
Absolutely not investing any more time in a platform run by a company that does shit like this. No wonder no one likes Citrix.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
DIAF. It is garbage.
Yes.
Garbage with a lot of overhead.
No.
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+1 for Proxmox, unless there something in its feature set you're missing. Happy with it here.
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@polygeekery
Are you saying I should promote Hyper-V to keep my top spot?
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Someone should release a virtualisation platform called Hypo V
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@jaloopa That would be also known as “bare metal.”
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@jaloopa said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
Someone should release a virtualisation platform called Hypo V
I think that would get under @Polygeekery's skin.
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@polygeekery
Although, at least Hyper-V hasn't (mostly) removed the ability to tell the hypervisor "hey, I need to make this VM match the NUMA architecture of the host, since it uses a bunch of RAM and your dumbshit rules of thumb to figure out when you should expose the pNUMA to the guest's vNUMA doesn't consider RAM allocations or availability at all."I'm
you, VMWare 6.5 
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@benjamin-hall
another reason to do it!
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I use VMware ESXi for my home lab, it's solid as a rock and the new HTML5 based web UI actually works pretty well.
Previously you had to use some .NET based management UI, which was as slow as a dog and for some obscure reason required you to install the Visual J# runtime. Visual J# was discontinued in May 2007.
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@alexmedia This must be why my colleagues have stopped moaning so much about vmware. (OK, not the free edition, but still…)
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@izzion said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@polygeekery
I hear Hyper-V is great for turning your servers into a heat source that can be used to facilitate facility burning.I don't know. But my current company, the previous one, and two companies before that all uses Hyper-V to host their VMs. Only two others using ESX servers (that's before they changed the product name to ESXi).
The nice thing about using only Microsoft product is that you can call their support as soon as you reached some situation you don't know how to fix it, instead of got ping-ponged between vendors who keep pointing it's the fault of product in another vendors and their product is fine. (Usually in these situation, it's fault from more than one product that's why it's so hard to diagnose)
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@alexmedia said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
I use VMware ESXi for my home lab, it's solid as a rock and the new HTML5 based web UI actually works pretty well.
Previously you had to use some .NET based management UI, which was as slow as a dog and for some obscure reason required you to install the Visual J# runtime. Visual J# was discontinued in May 2007.
Glad they finally replaced that. The old management interface was garbage. It was also laid out in the most illogical way possible. It was a real bear to work with.
Xenserver did have a good feature set and the management interface was pretty good overall. What I disliked about it was that it was Windows only. Xen Orchestra could help with the common tasks. But to do everything you needed a Windows machine. Also, as Xen Orchestra was a VM, if it went down you needed a Windows machine.
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@cartman82 said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
We are using proxmox. How does it compare?
Setup a proxmox server. Exported some VMs that downtime will not matter on. Go to import them and...well...there is no easy way to import a VM at all. Like...it is a trainwreck.
XVA and OVF files are very standard. There should be a way to directly import them without having to go through all of this. This seems like a feature that should have been implemented a long time ago.
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So I decide to just build a VM from scratch. We have an ISO repository that we keep on a Drobo, because it is cheap mass file storage. Go to the Storage options in Proxmox and go to add the Drobo share:
No SMB option. At all.
This is all going to take some getting used to. Lots of changes to the workflow.
Might have some time tomorrow to try out oVirt and see how well it works.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
No SMB option. At all.
This is all going to take some getting used to. Lots of changes to the workflow.
Might have some time tomorrow to try out oVirt and see how well it works.The last time I added ISO-s to the server, I think I just SSH-d in and
wget-ed them from the internet. ¯\(ツ)/¯I usually leave that shit to admins.
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@cartman82 said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
The last time I added ISO-s to the server,
That is something that in my opinion you should not have to do. ISOs should be stored in a repository accessible to all members of the cluster. Or do you just add them to one machine and they are accessible to all?
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
The first person to suggest Hyper-V gets moved to the top of the list of people whose homes I am going to burn down.
Virtualbox
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@polygeekery there is no cluster, all our dedicateds are isolated islands unto themselves. I think the admin just downloads his favorite centos iso on the fresh proxmox install, uses it to install VM-s and doesn't touch it again.
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@polygeekery
You know what, it's been a while since one of the buildings in my apartment complex burned down...Hyper-V is at least sane enough it can import VMs and can use shared storage for ISOs...
ducks
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Snapshot names in Proxmox cannot have punctuation. Nice.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
Snapshot names in Proxmox cannot have punctuation. Nice.
Oh, and it does not tell you that. It just...doesn't do anything. You name the snapshot, click the submit button and...nothing happens. No modal telling you why it is failing. Nothing. Just nothing happens. That is a pretty simple one and they should let you at least know it is failing and preferably why.
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@polygeekery
You know, I think I can translate all of your Proxmox discovery posts into a single post for you.@polygeekery should have said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
I guess I should pony up to the bar and pay for the real hypervisor, VMWare. Or use the frugal man's cousin, Hyper-V.
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@izzion said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
I guess I should pony up to the bar and pay for the real hypervisor, VMWare.
I was about to say that I never liked VMWare either, but then I remembered that the reason I did not like it was the shitty user interface, which they have apparently changed. I might have to give it another try. I hate to shell out big money on non-production machines though.
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@polygeekery I never liked VMware because I found it to be roughly one billion times slower than VirtualBox. But then, my VM use has never gone beyond "hobbyist" and "VM to sign into a client's VPN for historical reasons that don't really apply anymore but it's still kind of useful to keep their stuff away from the host machine", so I don't know how it is for more enterprisey concerns.
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For anyone interested, the community has put all the guts back in XenServer:
As for us, we rethought things and went back to bare metal on most items. I will be trying out xcp-ng in the near future though.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
For anyone interested,
Slightly.
Now to find an available machine to try it out... 'Cuz I doubt it will work very well inside another hypervisor
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@tsaukpaetra said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
For anyone interested,
Slightly.
Now to find an available machine to try it out... 'Cuz I doubt it will work very well inside another hypervisor
Too bad you don't live closer, I may be getting ready to cull some more hardware. Last time I did that someone here on the forums ended up with enough servers to nearly fill a 42U rack. I like to imagine he is live migrating VMs just because he can.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
Too bad you don't live closer
Heh, how much is pallet shipping to Phoenix AZ? :P
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@tsaukpaetra said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
Too bad you don't live closer
Heh, how much is pallet shipping to Phoenix AZ? :P
Not as cheap as throwing together an 8-core AMD rig if all you want is something to play around with virtualization on. ;)
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@polygeekery
But can the 8 core AMD rig fill a 42U server rack
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@izzion said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@polygeekery
But can the 8 core AMD rig fill a 42U server rackWith enough Fan, anything can fill a 42U server rack!
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@izzion said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@polygeekery
But can the 8 core AMD rig fill a 42U server rackDepends on the case mods.
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@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@tsaukpaetra said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
@polygeekery said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
For anyone interested,
Slightly.
Now to find an available machine to try it out... 'Cuz I doubt it will work very well inside another hypervisor
Too bad you don't live closer, I may be getting ready to cull some more hardware. Last time I did that someone here on the forums ended up with enough servers to nearly fill a 42U rack. I like to imagine he is live migrating VMs just because he can.
Can confirm :P
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Status: Since the new CPU arrived today, which completes my build destined to replace my current home server, I decided to revisit this.
Trying out ProxMox.
Installer booted fine, already had a FreeNAS boot drive set up (that does indeed boot!) and assumed it would just adjust the EFI to boot itself instead. Well, it asked me where to install, so I told it "See there yonder SSDs? Maken them into a Raid and do the needful!"
Well it went all the way through the copy and said it was done, so I rebooted and.... No. Doesn't boot. Joys.
Let's try BIOS mode! ... Ah, there it is!
But the nice wizard at the beginning was so pleasant before! Oh, it's for support, not to simply use it? Well, that wasn't obvious!
I'll just toodle around the interface for a while and see if I can get anything done... Looks simple enough to splat an ISO here on the storage. It's not entirely clear why there's to "storage" options, I selected one. I guess the ZFS pool is separate? But, where is the non-zfs one stored? This is going great already...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Citrix gutting Xenserver free edition:
But the nice wizard at the beginning was so pleasant before! Oh, it's for support, not to simply use it? Well, that wasn't obvious!
If you don't have a subscription, you'll also need to adjust the package sources. By default, Proxmox tries to download updates from the enterprise repository, which you cannot access.
The community repository is slightly less well-tested, but since there's a separate testing repo, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
I'll just toodle around the interface for a while and see if I can get anything done... Looks simple enough to splat an ISO here on the storage. It's not entirely clear why there's to "storage" options, I selected one.
Which options does it show you? By default, it should create a LVM thin pool on the local disk and offer to store images in a folder on the root file system as well.
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